Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Tuesday January 04, 2011 @10:02AM
from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.

a Flatbed Darkly writes "BT's Content Connect, a service which many have accused of threatening net neutrality, has apparently launched, although it is unknown whether or not any ISPs have bought or are planning to buy it yet; BT has denied the allegations, from Open Rights Group among others, that this, despite certainly being an anti-competitive service, does not create a two-tier internet. From the article: '"Contrary to recent reports in the media, BT's Content Connect service will not create a two-tier internet, but will simply offer service providers the option of differentiating their broadband offering through enhanced content delivery," a BT spokeswoman said.'"

Marco: "Commissar. I have rehabilitated another group of the party's enemies."Murphy: "Ha haaaa! Yeah! What does rehabilitated mean again?"Marco: "Beaten the asses of."Murphy: "I LOVE new-speak!"....Murphy: "Now, if you'll excuse me, we need to rehabilitate Phil...in the face."

Far more worryingly than a CDN in the exchange which people might *gasp* be expected to pay for, the page promoting it http://www.contentconnect.bt.com/ [bt.com] Seems to include clips of "Elephants Dream" which is CC-BY licensed without any attribution anywhere that I can see.

If you click the 'More' tab, there's a note which reads "This website uses OpenSource video content. (c) copyright 2006, Blender Foundation / Netherlands Media Art Institute / www.elephantsdream.org". BT do tend to be hypocritical asshats, but they appear to be following the terms of the license in this case.

This wouldn't be a BT first; the Home Hub, their free router, used to rather egregiously violate the GPL [zdnet.co.uk]. MoonBuggy does appear to be right, though, it'd be an interesting debate to have over whether concealed attribution constitutes attribution.

CC-BY license requires attribution according to how the rights-holder specifies; it's not specified by the CC-BY license terms itself.Without knowing how the copyright owner wants it to be specified, you can't know whether a specific method of attribution is in compliance.

BT has rolled out a new set of pneumatic tubes. One set if you pay will let your messages move around the UK with delightful burst of Steve Ballmer's "Obsession For BT" - dedicated BT only optical path.
If you dont pay you can wait for the converted "Bring out your dead" cart to be filled and get pushed along a dirt track. -kept to the shared, oversubscribed best effort networks.
BT should have spent more on backhaul.

A CDN in the exchange, from a technological prespective, could be a very good idea. The question is over the long-term business implications. A CDN, after all, is worthless if the un-CDNed best-effort service is good enough. Running the CDN gives BT an incentive to delay upgrading, lest they reduce the demand for the higher tier.

It's just good business sense on any tiered business. Don't make the cheap product too good, otherwise you cut into demand for the expensive product.

The articles seem somewhat unclear. Although it talks about local content caching, the BBC article also refers to a BT spokesperson explaining that "BT would not throttle or discriminate against other video services on the network, but did not rule out that ISPs using the network could do so.".

There's also the very real risk that with paid content caching done at the ISP level, the backbone connection to the wider internet will be neglected (or deliberately crippled) - the end result is ISP contracts being

Just to clarify after re-reading my post: even if the service is similar to that provided by Akamai, there's a significant conflict of interest when that service is provided by an ISP. They have the power and the motive to simply throttle all connections except those who pay to be part of the 'upgraded' service - a protection racket, basically. Akamai and the like never had the power to do this, so it wasn't an issue.

They don't need to throttle anything - that would be legally dubious. It's much safer for them to just do nothing, neglecting to upgrade the connection. They will still be providing a 'best effort' service, but just making sure that the best they can do isn't too good.

They don't need to throttle anything - that would be legally dubious. It's much safer for them to just do nothing, neglecting to upgrade the connection. They will still be providing a 'best effort' service, but just making sure that the best they can do isn't too good.

I'm pretty sure this is what Time Warner / Road Runner are doing in my Kansas City neighborhood right now. Every evening I get to see my DL rate drop to.8-2mbps and my pings rise to about 100 with occasional packet loss. It's sad when my 1mbps UL is greater than my DL.

No, it seems that's always been done. It does seem like they're more likely to confirm the accusation in the denial now though...

"Contrary to recent reports in the media, BT's Content Connect service will not create a two-tier internet, but will simply offer service providers the option of differentiating their broadband offering through enhanced content delivery,"

Or in other words:

"Contrary to recent reports in the media, BT's Content Connect service will not create a two-tier internet, but will

Um, did you read up and understand what this is all about? Or am I misunderstanding completely what BT is offering? Seems to me BT is simply offering to cache content on their own network to eliminate a lot of network hops, and reduce latency.

Can someone tell me how an ISP offering to cache media content, for a price, violates net neutrality or somehow manages to create a two-tier internet? Is Netflix _not_ allowed to pay BT to keep a copy of their movies available just for BT customers? Is BT _not_ allowed to cache high usage content that gets repeated hits from their users? I absolutely, positively don't see why anyone is making a big deal of this. Caching servers have been around for ages, and this seems to be just the next logical step. Are caching proxies now verboten?

It's the specific implementation that's the issue. To paraphrase what I said in a few other posts: when it's the ISP doing the caching there's nothing to stop them from throttling content from providers who don't pay to be included - in fact, there's a decent business incentive pushing them to do exactly that - it rapidly changes from an upgrade to 'protection money', a problem that did not exist with non-ISP cache servers.

If they were not an ISP, they wouldn't have the power to artificially degrade service

and they do it by throttling down transfers not ascribed to their 'new service', that is stealing bandwidth from everybody else, at least when they are running at full capacity again, they will have no choice but to upgrade their infrastructure so some people can start to enjoy the speed japanese folks got for a base broadband connection plan a few years ago

Contrary to recent reports in the media, BT's Content Connect service will not create a two-tier internet, but will simply offer service providers the option of differentiating their broadband offering through enhanced content delivery

I ran that through babelfish and got the translation: "Fuck you! We'll do whatever we want and you can't do a thing about it."

The Content Connect product is designed to enable Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to deliver video content within the UK to their customers more cost effectively than it has been possible to do previously. This is achieved by connecting a Content Distribution & Delivery platform to the IPstream Connect and Wholesale Broadband Connect networks. The Content Distribution & Delivery platform will be placed in the broadband network so that content by-passes the ISPs backhaul. Content Connect gives the opportunity for the ISPs to have a commercial relationship with the Content Service Providers (CSPs).

The Content Connect Basic product is for the CSP market

The Content Connect Standard and Premium service is available to ISPs who have a commercial relationship with CSPs.

Content Connect Key Benefits

End Users benefit from the new Content Connect product:

TV video entertainment will be delivered to the home through a broadband line with the option of an enhanced experience including HD internet video on TV.

ISPs benefit from the new Content Connect product:

Brings ISPs into the content value chain and allows them to earn revenue from delivering internet video from CSPs .

CSPs benefit from the new Content Connect product:

CSPs can have their content delivered at a higher quality of service.

For further information please contact your Account Manager

I think I like this. It basically says hey, ISPs pay for back-haul bandwidth (i.e. Level 3 plugs into Qwest, NetFlix is on Level 3's side, Qwest lets you access NetFlix, Qwest pays for the ASSLOADS of bandwidth they ring up across their link to Level 3's network), so now ISPs have the option of entering a deal with NetFlix to coordinate between NetFlix, Qwest, and technical consultant BT to get NetFlix's data on Qwest's side of the fence. NetFlix doesn't move; it just puts a back-end link or a copy of th

In UK terms, back-haul refers to the connection from the ADSL provider's kit in the exchange ( central office ) back to the ISP's network through the ADSL provider's POPs. This is distinct from the ISP's connection to the Internet ( Level 3 in your example ).

ISPs which rent ADSL services wholesale from BT Group generally use BT's back-haul but there are various back-haul options ( big players being BE, Easynet and C&W ).

This BT service delivers content from the POPs, so that the ISP's backhaul is not l

"BT's Content Connect, a service which many have accused of threatening net neutrality, has apparently launched, although it is unknown whether or not any ISPs have bought or are planning to buy it yet

Why would ISPs have to pay to use Bittorrent? Isn't it free and Open Source?

They dream to pop each packet and charge Apple, MS, Google ect per packet.
Until then they will just cash in on the end users addiction for a non buffering connection every month.
Bittorrent does provide a nice cover in a press release when all non enhanced content hits a hard shaped wall.

I think this is basically an Akamai-like caching server. And I can see where the controversy lies.

If BT implements this and doesn't intentionally throttle other services, I don't see this as a violation of neutrality - BT is not discriminating against anyone in using the Internet pipe, they are simply maintaining a cache service for those who want to cough up a little more dough for their web sites to be stored in a local cache. BP customers can still access anything they want on the Internet at Internet

It will DEFINATELY become abused because then either everyone needs to start paying, or the service will get so bad that it will become unusable. For example netflix which has PLENTY of outgoing bandwidth, and I which have nearly 10 times the bandwidth to receive a movie can't watch it because it gets bottlenecked by the connection between my ISP and netflix. My ISP won't upgrade their connection, and instead starts to suggest that netflix buy a caching server on their network t

I think you may have missed my point, or I made it poorly (which is likely). Let me try again.

The issue at hand is network neutrality.

A caching service like this can easily benefit both the ISP and the customer by reducing unnecessary bandwidth, as long as it isn't abused. The gist of the article is that "caching servers bad", and I disagree. I agree that caching servers can be abused, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

If BT implements this and doesn't intentionally throttle other services,

You can stop right there. If BT's pipes were not already massively oversold to the point of pure comedy, they would not be trying to move companies like YouTube to caching servers in the first place. Therefore, the current state of affairs is essentially that they are massively throttling everyone's services. In short, if they implement this, they'd be violating the principles of net neutrality from day one.

I don't have the exact statistics, so I may be wrong - feel free to downvote if you disprove this - but I've rarely seen anyone not on a BT line, until the '60s the company which was previously BT had a complete (government-instated) monopoly of telecom infrastructure, and it is known that BT still owns the majority of lines. A lot of TSPs won't give service over anything but BT lines, and I've seen a few ISPs do similarly. If this is being offered to all ISPs on BT's network, as the BBC article claims, the

You're only thinking ADSL - and, yes, 90% of the ADSL out there is over BT-owned copper. There are some phone companies that do LLU so although it uses original BT copper, it's literally only using the *copper* and actually connected to non-BT equipment in the exchange, hence BT has no say over it. Bulldog used to do this but they are only available in limited areas, for obvious reasons (where they can make money by pulling enough people off BT equipment and taking the "risk" themselves).

I believe you're slightly misinformed. There are three broad "classes" of internet connection in Britain: Firstly, there's cable, provided by Virgin Media - phone, TV and net traffic all go over their fibre/copper, so BT's services don't apply there. I couldn't find a figure for how many subscribers they have, but they are a very large company so I'd imagine the number is not insignificant.

Secondly, there's BT Wholesale. This uses BT's infrastructure, linked to BT equipment at the local exchange, and resold to consumers via retail ISPs (including BT's own retail division). These retail ISPs are the ones covered by Content Connect. Five years ago this covered almost all users in Britain, and even now BT Wholesale products have many millions of users, but their reach is declining.

The final category is LLU, or 'Local Loop Unbundled' services. These are the ones that require a BT line (in order to connect you to the local exchange), but then hook that line into the ISPs own equipment when it gets there. Ofcom forced BT to accommodate the LLU equipment in their exchanges. This entirely bypasses BT Wholesale (so no Content Connect), meaning that the retail ISP takes home more of the profit, which is why it's becoming more popular with the big ISPs who can afford to install their own DSL hardware at a decent number of exchanges. Services from Sky, TalkTalk, Be, and others use LLU equipment where available but fall back to a BT Wholesale product for those users connected to exchanges where their equipment has not been installed.

To be fair and having RTFA, this doesn't seem to impact on Net Neutrality at all. This is a BT sponsored CDN (Content Delivery Network) that they are offering to their customers. This does not affect the traffic passing over the network, they are simply offering a network of local hosts to optimise content delivery. Like Akami and other such geographical CDN.

Especially since BT serves a very small country (Britain, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland together don't have the land area or population of Texas).

If you're talking about BitTorrent, the acronym BT doesn't need to be explained here, but to those of us in Australia, Canada, the US, and in fact every other country in the whole world, British Telecom needs to be spelled out.

Going through the content connect website, it appears that instead of content traveling from content providers through the internet to an ISP, then to end users, instead, now it goes from a content connect content provider, who is hosting the content provider's content, held in cache, somehow physically closer to end users, and bypasses the ISP.

Obviously this cannot be true, but that is what the combination of words and moving images would present.

Similar to those deployed by Akamai and Limelight for their customers, and by Google and Microsoft for themselves.

A typical case of a Telco moving into an additional market.Arguably, it does allow BT to offer multi-tier services. But it is not packet-level differentiationin the network, which is the issue at the heart of the net-neutrality debate.

If Content Distribution Networks violate net neutrality and the/. crowd thinks so, thenwe should be blasting Akamai and Google long time before we started blasting the Telcos.

I'd say it's a CDN with a significant conflict of interest. There's nothing to stop BT from throttling content from providers who don't pay to be included, for instance - in fact, there's a decent business incentive pushing them to do exactly that - it rapidly changes from an upgrade to 'protection money', a problem that did not exist with non-ISP CDNs.

The issue here is preferential treatment of packets originating from CDNs on BT's preferred (paying) provider list. If Google or Akamai offered my broadband connection, and gave their own products preference over other people's competing products, they'd be shot down in seconds by anti-competition laws. The fact that they're paying BT for this service is the very definition of a breach of network neutrality: A packet being given preference over another because of its content, source, or destination.

My point is that this "Content Connect" service is the equivalent of putting an Akamai cache at BT's central exchanges, so the content from Akamai is always faster than those served from outside the network. It's preferential treatment in exchange for payment.

Maybe Akamai is a bad example. Think of it more as Skype and $Foo VoIP service. Skype doesn't pay for Content Connect, $Foo does. When the network is saturated, $Foo packets will be given priority over Skype packets, making Skype's service less valuab

Please excuse what is probably a fairly ignorant question, I'm not too clued in about networking.

A quick look about the BT website in the summary brings up a page supposedly explaining how it works: what they seem to be saying is that they take "Connect Content" and put it on its own server which is physically closer to wherever you are. Then, instead of having to connect to a server, say, 3,000 miles away via choc-a-bloc networks for that video, you're connecting to one maybe one or two hundred miles awa

Please forgive me for being perhaps a little naive, but the CDN seems like a good thing to me. If I, as a home user, get to connect to a local delivery device, I (presumably) get better service, since there's less routing, less networks with potential bottlenecks, etc. that I have to traverse. If I, as an ISP, get my customers to connect to a local delivery device, then my users use less bandwidth on my backbone network because they are streaming from a local source rather than from somewhere on the far s

It's not until an ISP actually begins throttling connections to sources other than the CDN that there's a Net Neutrality issue, and in that case, it's the throttling, not the CDN, that is the problem.

The issue is that the throttling needn't be overt (although BT actually state in the BBC article that ISPs are welcome to throttle other sites) - if the most popular content is already on the CDN, they can simply cut back on what they spend on the backbone connection. Suddenly you've got 1000 users, all on 20Mbps last-mile connections, sharing 50Mbps of actual backbone bandwidth because the ISP wants to save money on the backbone, degrade the experience of all the sites outside the CDN, and push as many pro

As usual, RTFA, if you have the requisite skill. The only content on the network involved is BT premium content. There is nothing else there to throttle. Even if you have trouble reading, you can see it in the picture.

I did RTFA; BT is renting space on Content Connect to any content provider that wants to pay, and providing its services to any ISP under the BT Wholesale umbrella. BT Wholesale has every reason to start cutting backbone bandwidth and slowing connections to those sites who choose not to be part of the system.

A lot of people don't like the idea of ISP serving content at all due to the conflict of interest that leads to net neutrality issues. While this particular case is a mild example of it, once we start allowing this kind of thing, it's a slippery slope to all kinds of problems.

A lot of the mobile phone subscription deals and some of the 3G internet-only subscriptions have severe limits but 'unlimited' access to sites like facebook and youtube.You can also buy additional access to a selection of usual social-media sites for most subscriptions. Look here [three.com.au] for some pricing examples.

With our restrictive data limits even on fixed ADSL lines i would not be surprised if we get so see some "unlimited access to facebook" deals in the near future.

The situation is the same here in the UK too; extortionate data charges and use policies, but all you can eat data for YouTube and Facebook.

I find the YouTube deal particularly annoying, simply because whenever I went over my data limits, it was normally for email and browsing, and certainly not streamed video. So based on the effect that streamed video is going to put a much bigger strain on a mobile network than web and email, I can only assume that backroom deals have been done, and hence a multi-tiered

Pay X per month, get 1MBit/second. pay X+Y and get a faster connection.

The ISPs have always had a market where more money == faster service, we are also used to the idea of paywalls where some stuff is free and other stuff needs money to get access to. So where, exactly, does this idea that everyone should get access to everything for the same price come from? Would it still be "net neutral" if Facebook suddenly started charging $10 / year for "membership"? Is that really any different from your ISP sayin

You're paying the ISP for the transfer of bits. Those bits are identical (aside from certain peering and QoS issues) whether they are from Facebook, YouTube or Slashdot - if ISPs start charging for identical bits based purely on their origin, it allows them to extort money from all content providers by simply threatening to slow down or block their traffic if they don't pay up.

If you started paying Facebook a fee, that would be for the services provided by Facebook, not for the data transferred from their s

Time based or demand based charging isn't the issue here. If they want to charge more at peak time than the middle of the night I'll hear them out.

The issue is artificially delaying an identical 1MB of data, at the same time of day, over the same network (insert any more 'identical' caveats you feel necessary) purely because one content provider paid their protection money and the other didn't.

Dozens to choose from? In my city, there is one cable company (Time Warner), and a few unreliable DSL providers to choose from, with peak transfer rates below one megabyte/second. And trying to play even casual realtime online games with satellite is an exercise in frustration. Who, exactly, should I switch to?

If you think your ISP is screwing you, just change to another. There are dozen / hundreds to choose from - the free market will kill off any that aren't competitive.

That's great, as long as you live in a sufficiently populated area. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. There are many, many places where there is one, government-subsidized ISP to choose from because it is a remote area where the free market cannot support even a single ISP. I suppose you could always switch to satellite, but (warning: bad/. car analogy!) that's kind of like saying you can choose between a Yugo and a skateboard for transportation.

Because the mutual co-existence of USPS, UPS, DHL, FedEx, et al, ensure that no one company is going to be extremely egregious in their pricing. I.E., there is a free market that tends to seek a fair price for the service provided. With Internet service, that is not always the case.

Fair enough. But, would any of those services (outside USPS) exist if we had 'mail neutrality' rules that meant all shipping companies were REQUIRED to carry first class mail, bulk rate mail, magazines, packages, etc, and were PREVENTED from offering differentiating services like expedited delivery? That would mean that the only way for those companies to 'compete' would either be to a) have faster overall service for all mail (very expensive), or b) get into a price war. Neither one of those options is

ISPs are welcome to differentiate themselves by offering higher bandwidth, or lower latency, or whatever - precisely analogous to shipping companies choosing to offer first class, or expedited, or high-weight deliveries.

What your hypothetical "mail neutrality" law would (in an ideal world) do is prevent FedEx from signing a deal which says "Amazon purchases will arrive within 48 hours, all others will take three weeks, and there's nothing you can do about it". Even then, the already stretched analogy would

How would net neutrality allow offers of higher bandwidth, etc? If they are truly neutral then they must either raise the bandwidth for everyone or no-one. And that is exactly what I said - their only options for differentiation are raise the bandwidth (expensive) or engage in a price war.

I don't understand your point about 'nothing you can do about it'. There IS something you can do about it - you can pay the same rate as Amazon does to get the better service. UPS (and all the other shipping companies)

As far as I can tell, you are somewhat misunderstanding the intent of net neutrality. The ISPs' customers are the end users, not the content providers - nobody has ever intended to stop the ISP from differentiating themselves by offering the end user a package at (say) 10Mbps for $10/month or 50Mbps for $25/month or whatever. If they start offering a 100Mbps package, that doesn't mean they have to start providing that bandwidth to everyone, just to those end users who pay for it.

I do understand the point of neutrality, I just don't agree with it. I, as a consumer, am not the slightest bit interested in bandwidth, just like I am not interest in signing a contract with UPS so that ALL my packages are delivered 'next day'. I don't care if my email takes a few seconds longer to arrive. I don't care if OS updates take much longer to arrive. However, I am very interested in having the two or three NetFlix movies I watch a month being displayed at high quality and smoothly. If that r

Bad analogy++. It's more like if UPS not only charges the shipper their standard rate, but then starts shaking down the receiver for more $ as well, with the threat that if they dont pay then their shipments will arrived damaged and/or late on a regular basis.

So what are you going to do? Make it illegal to bypass existing internet nodes to deliver IP services? Make it illegal to offer more bandwidth than existing IP services? How about making it illegal to charge more than any existing IP Service? How about making it illegal to charge less than any existing IP Service?

Why don't we just quit all this nonsense and pass laws for bandwidth and price controls, along with an "IP Commission" to enforce them?

I had the misfortune of being at the end of a BT line for the past 10 days, and noticed throttling of torrents, at least, at some times of the day.

I had been torrenting on a Zen line and had been maxing out the line all day with the stuff I was downloading. When I tried to finish a torrent off on the BT (business grade) connection it would only go to a maximum of about 25k/sec. Fired up some other torrents, and whilst trying to figure out what was going on, the maximum overall for multiple torrents seemed t

The problem is that the backbone necessary to do that costs serious money. A CDN is a more efficient use of the existing infrastructure, and costs a whole lot less than an extra few thousand miles of fiber.

What amazes me is that BT and other ISPs don't simply offer this for free, because it benefits them as much as it does their customers. I guess any revenue stream is a good revenue stream, but if they simply cached ALL static content and worked out deals with people like NetFlix to store encrypted copie